With the increasingly popularity of multimedia-capable computers, and the digitalization of multimedia in general, the importance of multimedia data embedding has become more important. In one type of multimedia data embedding, a key, also know as a watermark, is embedded into multimedia data, a process which is known as watermarking. This allows questions of ownership of a given piece of multimedia data—which may be widely distributed by virtue of the Internet, for example—to be resolved, by attempting to decode the key from the multimedia data. That is, by watermarking multimedia data, the data owner can determine whether a suspect piece of multimedia data is his or hers by determining whether the watermark is present in the suspect data.
For example, a record company, prior to making its music selections available on the Internet for widespread purchase and use, can first watermark the data representing a music selection. If a site on the Internet is providing bootleg copies of the music selections, but claims that the copies are not in fact owned by the record company, the company can prove that they are indeed owned by it by showing that the watermark is present in the bootleg copies. Therefore, watermarking has applicability to audio multimedia, as well as other types of multimedia, such as image and video multimedia.